Introduction

This article shows you how to serialize a class or standard variable over a TCP/IP socket connection. It shows an example of how to setup the TCP/IP connection, setup other needed classes, and send/receive data over the socket.

I pulled from the MFC class CSocketFile. As you may know, CSocketFile lets you send and receive data to/from a network connection using a CArchive. The drawback is that the implementation of CSocket that is used has 16 bit code in it - not good for any decent application.

So I basically re-wrote them using CBlockingSocket (instead of CSocket) which uses 32 bit code and is better optimized. This allows you to attach a CArchive to an open CSocketFile and then serialize data to and from it (thus sending an receiving the data across the network).

Details

Here are the basic steps:

Create and connect a CBlockingSocket object to the computer you want to send/receive data with

Create a CBlockingSocketFile and attach it to the CBlockingSocket object you created in step 1 above.

Create a CArchive object and attach it to the CBlockingSocketFile object you created in step 2 above. NOTE: You must create 1 CArchive for sending and 1 for receiving.

Send your data or classes using the CArchive object created in step 3. You can send any serializable class or raw variables. VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: make sure you flush the CArchive object after you’re done sending data. This ensures all data is written across the network and tells the socket at the other end to go ahead and receive it.

Close out the CArchive objects and the CBlockingSocket object. NOTE: Don’t close the CBlockingSocketFile object or it will assert.

Conclusion

That’s basically it. Of course, I’m making one assumption that there’s a listening socket on the other end ready to send/receive the data. For convenience I’ve added an appendix below with the code to setup a listening (server) socket and receive the data then send an acknowledgment.

In the future I may derive from CArchive and add functionality to make this whole process even easier, but for now I think this is pretty straight forward. Enjoy and happy coding!

License

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I'm pretty new at this but it seems to me that sending pointers would be completely useless since even though you could send them the memory adresses they reference would contain other data and the pointer would therefore be useless.